The prices of 3D printers have been slowly coming down, but even then the cheapest so far have been around the $500 mark. Canada-based inventor Rylan Grayston has hit upon a new formula that dramatically cuts the price, enabling him to make the world’s first $100 3D printer. And what’s more, the Peachy Printer doubles up as a 3D scanner when attached to any normal digital camera.
Already, the Peachy Printer has blown past its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and is at over $350,000 at the time of writing. The hand-sized cubic device needs to be connected to external apparatus in its kit, as well as a computer.
The base kit for $100 (with $20 shipping outside Canada) requires assembly, although Grayston says that takes only an hour to do and doesn’t require any engineering knowledge. For $400 or more, you get a fully assembled Peachy Printer kit. Say what you want, but this is still far cheaper than the DIY 3D printers that cost around $1000.
To make the price so low, Grayston had to break the mould and do something different to how traditional 3D printers work. The full science behind Peachy Printer and its apparatus is too long to explain in a blog post, so here’s Grayston elaborating on it in a video:
The 3D object is made out of resin, a small amount of which is packaged with the kit. Peachy Printer doesn’t think the resin will be too expensive as it notes the blue cube in the picture above costs 10 cents worth of resin to print.
As mentioned earlier, Peachy Printer also acts as a 3D scanner if you hook it up with a digital camera (anything from a webcam to a DSLR). Peachy emits a laser that scans the object while the Blender plugin uses smart algorithms to decode it as a 3D model.
Will you be buying a Peachy? How do you think it’ll do against the big guys like MakerBot? Let us know your thoughts on it.